cry of disloyalty to win the temporary support of their constituents; and I think it is better so; it is a question which will not bear being approached in a party spirit; it must be dealt with on the broadest and most liberal basis, and we must wait for the time when the best men of all parties, sink

I have mentioned this conversation because it represents the ideas of many whom I met in the different provinces; and knowing that the feeling in favor of independence is not only entertained, but favorably entertained, by so many of the people, I am surprised that it has not attained more prominence as a public question; and I am convinced that in a very short time it will be the great question to be decided by the Canadian people.

At present the leaders of each party seem to fer to approach the subject, as they think their opponents will make use of the

birth to the new nationality.

A question which involves so much could only be superficially treated in the compass of a short article like this, which is only intended to call the attention of the people to the ideas which have been almost insensibly growing and maturing amongst them; and any discussion of the merits or demerits of the question, or of the form of government which would be most desirable in the event of our becoming independent, can well be left until the question has come more prominently before the people.

Argus.

EVERY poet, paradoxical as the asserpot; seem, is essentially

and inevitably more or less a philosopher. The higher his verse, the more important is the thought-or, we should rather say, faith-which underlies and inspires it. A skylark may sing out of pure fulness of heart; no man ever did. And the reason is surely plain enough. The mystery of being, the riddle of this painful earth, can never be wholly overlooked by the human mind, much less by the clear and susceptible soul of the true singer. Chaucer, Spenser, Keats, and several others, are not, as some critics have held, exceptions to this theory, although they may appear so to the careless reader. The 'joyous Paganism' which has been attributed to these sensuous poets, is clouded ever and anon by shadows of grief and doubt, by blank inward questionings, yearning cries that rise up suddenly to fall back again unanswered and unanswerable by the writers. It is—

'A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want;'*

and the very fact that an important section of our modern poets has found it necessary deliberately to trundle back their souls some hundred years '-to seek inspiration in classic or medieval times, ignoring the present age, so pregnant with vast and momentous issues simply shows us that these writers are making a futile attempt to do away, by artificial means, with the metaphysical and speculative element which has existed in poetry from all time, and which must exist so long as man possesses the faculties of reason and imagination. This granted, it must be evident that the works of any specially original and representative poet are valuable, not only on account of their intrinsic beauty, but as indications of the course of what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the Time-spirit. The great poet is the avant-courier of the Time-spirit-the

Shelley.

Carlyle's letter to the Times upon the Eastern question; and his latest brochure, 'A Note on Charlotte Brontë.'

In giving our judgment as to the above works, it is not our purpose to do more than allude to the controversy which has lately been raging as to the aim and end of art. Some of Mr. Swinburne's most startling theories are placed beyond the reach of serious examination, if we admit that he writes solely as an artist. But the plea is surely a poor one. Shelley, as we know, was never tired of inculcating the doctrine of 'art for art's sake;' but some of his works are a standing refutation of the theory that true poetry cannot afford to be didactic. We may be ready to admit that art is not to be made a handmaid to religion, or morality, or science. But no art, unless it be purely imitative, can exist without conveying some lesson. And here we come back to the point from which we started. Mr. Morris professes the negation of all philosophy; but in such lines as

The

Kiss me, love, for who knoweth What thing cometh after death? and in his quaint but beautiful play, 'Love is enough,' he has laid down the lines of a very distinct and intelligible creed. theory that art is a law unto itself was advanced by the defenders of Swinburne's verse, and is, we believe, the doctrine of the poet himself. But that a man, in the exercise of his art, should bring forward new principles and denounce old ones, and yet be responsible in no rational sense for these, seems to be the height of absurdity.

The least important of this poet's works are his early tragedies-The Queen Mother' and Rosamond.' While displaying some dramatic energy, along with a wonderful glow of generous warmth throughout, they are immature and diffuse. There are, however, several magnificent passages throughout the latter poem-as witness the subdued pathos and mournful music of King Henry's closing speech as he bids. farewell to the corpse of Rosamond. In 'Poems and Ballads' we enter, as it were, into a strange and stormy sea;

But see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,

A pavement of pearl. *

*Matthew Arnold.

Repelled perhaps at first by the unfamiliarity of sentiment, and the chaotic melodies of verse, most readers, after a second or third perusal, will be drawn towards these poems with a strange fascination. Few, it is true, will find themselves in sympathy with the tide of fierce and infinite desire that throbs through the cadences of that most musical paraphrase of Sappho-'Anactoria;' nor will they find much pleasure in such passages as this:

Ah! ah! thy beauty-like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like a serpent smites.

That I could eat thy body, and could taste, The faint flakes from thy bosom to thy waist. Still, as the poet has himself explained, the poem from which these lines are taken is simply the outcome of his endeavor to render fitly the spirit of the most passionate ode ever sung by the most passionate singer of ancient Greece. In the lingering melody of 'Dolores' we find more of Charles Baudelaire than of Sappho. In apostrophising Dolores, our Lady of Pain—an abstraction, of which it were best, perhaps, not to attempt definition-the poet cries, somewhat hysterically,

What ailed us, O Gods, to desert you

For creeds that refuse and restrain?
Come down and redeem us from virtue,
Our Lady of Pain !

Yet another phase of sentiment, as morbid as the last :

From too much love of living,

From fear of death set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever Gods there be,
That no man lives forever,

That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river,

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

These lines may be simply a dramatic expression of sentiment; but they seem more likely to represent in reality the fluctuations of a poetical and unsatisfied soul-' moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.'*

In 'Atalanta in Calydon' the erotic element is almost entirely absent. It is a Sophoclean tragedy, imbued throughout with the thoroughly Greek sentiment of patient submission to an inexorable Fate, save in one chorus, which is a passionate protest against the idea of a personal Deity. He who

*Arnold.

Smites without sword, and scourges without rod, The supreme evil, God.

That this is not altogether a dramatic expression of feeling, but rather the utterance of the author's own belief, is evident enough, as a Greek chorus could hardly, be expected to declaim against the one Deity. 'Chastelard,' again, is a poem of quite a different different stamp. Its luscious and effeminate verse is well adapted to the theme, and the luckless lover of Mary Queen of Scots might have written the delicate little French chansons which are sprinkled through the drama. The poem, however, we are inclined to think, might, of all Mr. Swinburne's works, be best spared. Each of the volumes referred to, nevertheless, is of value as showing the state of the poet's mind at the time of their production. A passionate, intensely poetical soul-for we believe, since the time of Shelley, no man has been born with so boundless an enthusiasm for his art as Swinburne-such a soul, let loose upon the world in this nineteenth century, breathes an uncongenial atmosphere. The Philistines are upon him if he worships other gods than theirs. His mind may find refuge only in idealism of one sort or another. Like Shelley, he may idealise humanity, and worship it in the abstract; or like Keats he may throw his soul out towards nature. Mr. Swinburne, in his youth, seems to have followed the example of the latter. But his spirit had not the divine tranquillity of Keats; the injustice and folly of men around him, real or fancied, broke rudely into this dreamland of his, and roused his excitable temperament to what was almost a temporary frenzy. Doubt, however, is in most men but a transient condition of mind. Mr. Swinburne, like Byron and like Shelley, soon found a theme worthy of his powers, and his muse lighted her torch at the flame on the altar of Liberty-then burning brighter than for many a year. The enthusiasm which spread all over England during that glorious struggle for Italy's independence, of which Garibaldi and Mazzini were the leaders, touched the lips of this poet as with fire, and gave us the clarion-like music of the 'Song of Italy,' dedicated to the great republican writer:

Earth shall grow dim with all her golden things, Pale people and hoar kings;

Yet, though the thrones and towers of nations fall,
Death hath no part in all,

In heaven, nor in the imperishable sea,
Nor Italy, nor thee.

Mr. Swinburne's greatest and most characteristic work is, to our mind, the Songs before Sunrise.' In the prologue to this volume, which may be regarded as allegorical, are these lines-which may, or may not, contain a piece of personal spiritual history :

Then he stood up, and trod to dust,

Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,
And dreams of bitter things and sweet;
And shod, for sandals on his feet,
Patience, and knowledge of what must,
And of what may be, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust-

The time is past when such an one can sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangle's of Neæra's hair." The existence of Humanity, its claims for assistance and pity, have at length dawned upon the dreamer. The next piece to the prologue is an ode, of some length, in which the poet calls upon the nations of Europe to join in the Republic, One and Indivisible,' which shall gather together and regenerate man. Then we have Messidor,' with its fugue-like movement, and grand burden, 'Put in the sickles and reap.' The influence of Victor Hugo, to whom the book is dedicated, is clearly discernible in the most magnificent piece of all-Mater Triumphalis '-beginning thus:

Through the long years, the centuries brazen-gated,
Beside the barred inexorable doors,
From the morning till the evening have we waited,
Lest thy foot haply sound on the awful floors.

The floors untrodden of the sun's feet glimmer,
The star-unstricken pavements of the night,
Do the lights burn inside yet? The lights wax
dimmer,

On festal faces withering out of sight.

The crowned heads lose the light on them; it

may be

Dawn is at hand to strike the loud feast dumb, To blind the torch-lit centuries till the day be, The feasting kingdoms till thy kingdon come.

The poet has at length found his ideal, and embraces it with all the passionate energy of his nature

I have no spirit of skill with equal fingers At time to sharpen or to slacken strings,

* Milto n.

I keep no pace of song with gold-perched singers, Or chirps of linnets on the wrist of kings.

I am thy storm-bird in the days that darken,

The petrel in the wind that bears thy bark To port through night and tempest; if thou hearken My voice is in thy heavens before the lark.

My song is in the mist that hides thy morning,
My cry is up before the day for thee,

I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning

Before thy wings divide the sky and sea.

Birds shall rise after, voiced and feathered fairer,
To see in summer what I see in spring,

I have eyes and heart to endure thee, O thunderbearer,

And they shall be who shall have tongues to sing.

The philosophy of this latter-day poet is still more completely shown forth in a rather long piece entitled 'The Hymn of Man,' written, as he tells us, during the session of the Ecumenical Council at Rome. The poem is a diatribe against the religious— or rather the theistic-idea, and a prophecy that it shall not much longer dominate the mind of Man. To any orthodox reader the sentiment of the Hymn of Man,' must be inexpressibly shocking, and for boldness the 'supreme blasphemy' of the closing part is without a parallel in contemporary literature. The orthodox conception of God is to the poet a hateful thing; man, according to Mr. Swinburne, is to shake off the theistic superstition :'

For his face is set to the east, his feet on the past

and its dead,

The sun re-arisen is his priest, and the light thereof hallows his head.

Who are ye that would bind him with curses, or blind him with vapour of prayer,

Your night is as night that disperses when light is alive in the air.

And after a torrent of incrimination unequalled in eloquence, even if false in sentiment, the poem closes—

Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things!

Those who have studied, even in the slightest degree, the more modern developments of thought in England, will at once perceive that this poem is simply Positivism set to music. This visionary poet has, after all, reached the same conclusions as that school of philosophy, which, based on the writings of Auguste Comte, prides itself above all things on the tangible and The practical nature of its teachings. religion of Humanity, as expounded by Mr. John Morley and his like, is a cult devoid of mystery, and unattractive to idealists. It changes the basis of Faith and Hope as understood by Christians. It sinks the individual in the community and pitilessly regulates all human effort to its one object. It may be an illustration of the law of extremes, that such a faith should find its poet-laureate in one who has hitherto been distinguished by his avowed opposition to all restriction imposed on the individual. At any rate, he is certain to act as interpreter of the new religion to that large order of minds which are more imaginative than critical, and for this reason, if for no other, the works of this latter-day poet possess some interest, and must be regarded as an important contribution to modern literature.

GEORGE H. B. GRAY.